India's First Private Orbital Rocket, Skyroot's Vikram-1 To Carry Multiple Test Payloads

In the payload bay would be from Grahaa Space; Embrace, a robotic arm from Cosmoserve; DCubed and Skyroot’s own SCOPE along with a Cosmos Diamonds' artwork and a microart of renowned Indian scientists Sir C.V. Raman, Dr Vikram Sarabhai (in whose honour Vikram-1 is named), and former President and rocket scientist Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

The Embrace robotic arm will remain attached to Vikram-1's payload deck while carrying out its planned demonstration.

Two payloads will celebrate creativity and India's scientific heritage. These include Cosmic Bloom, developed by Cosmos Diamonds, featuring a diamond jewellery creation mounted on an aluminium base plate, and Microart, an 18K gold rocket model holding micro-sculptures of Sir Raman, Dr Sarabhai and Dr Kalam each smaller than a grain of rice.

Microart is developed by Skyroot Aerospace, contains three micro-sculptures measuring 700 × 980 microns (0.7 millimetres x 0.98 mm) each and is credited to Telangana-based Ajay Kumar Mattewada. The micro-sculptures are small enough to fit in the eye of a needle.

SCOPE, an in-house payload by Skyroot, is designed to validate the company's onboard spacecraft systems and mission technologies during the Vikram-1 flight.

Said Ramesh Kumar V., co-founder and CEO, Grahaa Space, whose SOLARAS will fly on Vikram-1: “India’s space sector is witnessing a remarkable phase of innovation and entrepreneurship, and missions like Vikram-1 are helping expand opportunities for emerging space companies to demonstrate and scale their technologies.”

SOLARAS is a 1U CubeSat developed by Grahaa Space, based in Karnataka, to demonstrate indigenous satellite technology in orbit. uD3PP and mD3RN are in-orbit demonstration payloads developed by Dcubed GmbH, a company based in Germany, to validate their space technologies under orbital conditions.

Cosmic Bloom, from Cosmos Diamonds in Karnataka, carries diamond jewellery mounted on an aluminium base plate, making it a symbolic and unique commercial payload aboard the mission.

On the Embrace robotic arm, Dr Chiranjeevi Phanindra, founder and CEO of Cosmoserve Space said the start-up accelerated its soft-robotic capture technology from concept to flight-ready in just four months, advancing the space debris removal capabilities being developed at Cosmoserve Space. “This mission marks an important milestone in advancing technologies that will enable future in-orbit servicing and orbital sustainability.”